Starblade vs Galaxian³ : System comparison

[DarthNuno]

Because I want *so badly* to help as much as I can the understanding of the Galaxian3 hardware, here's the comparison between the Starblade boards (Namco System 21) and Galaxian3 (Namco System 21 'custom'?).

Fortunately, I own all the boards from both games  

Let's start with few of them first (I don't want to have a room full of boards  )...



Note : you can click on all pictures from this post for a 'big size' picture  

1. DSP board :



UP      : Starblade DSP board
DOWN : Galaxian3 board

Hey, they seem to be ... the same board  

Yes, the board is exactly the same... see the reference on it :

For Starblade  



For Galaxian3



Now, the differences, regarding the settings :

For Starblade no EPROM at position 1F, 1K1, 1N



For Galaxian3 there are EPROMs at position 1F, 1K1, 1N




Now, see the difference between the jumpers position :

         Starblade            Galaxian3

JP3       VCC                    GND
JP4       GND                    VCC

all the jumpers are set in the same position.

  100% the same board, but not populated the same (*)

(*) : Well, because it's a 'spare' Starblade board, maybe the EPROMs have been removed. I'll check on the DPS board *inside* my working Starblade game.

[Naibo]

yes, they are the same board. starblade should have EPROMs.

However, I noticed that the OBJ board between these 2 games are different. Could you take some pictures of them?
 

[DarthNuno]

OK Naibo, let's compare the OBJ boards :

2. OBJ board :

Left : Starblade [named :  8623961803 OBJ(B)]             Right : Galaxian3 [named :  8623962002 OBJ(C)]



Examine the OBJ board from Starblade (the Galaxian3 board details are available in this post) :






COMPONENT SIDE :



[click on the pictures for the full 600 DPI size picture (approx 14MB)]

SOLDERING SIDE :



[click on the pictures for the full 600 DPI size picture (approx 12MB)]

As you can see, the OBJ board are very similar for both games.

Let me know if you need more details (jumpers position, better pictures, ...)

[Naibo]

Yes, I saw some difference between the 2 obj boards.
Actually, there are also some different in software side I've noticed, the palette structure, for example.

I'm submitting my galaxian3td driver to MAME soon. I'll update the 3D Model Viewer as well, since its own palette has recently been extracted , we needn't borrow it from starblade anymore. 

BTW, for those PCB pictures for galaxian3td, could you send me their original scans, before photoshop's joining? Since there are some tiny mis-matches in the joined border, although not a lot, a few important signals are affected.

Let me send you my email address by message?

[DarthNuno]

I've sent you all the files I've used for the pictures via PM 

But I didn't have the CPU one left. I've done new scan today, here the component side :

CPU part 1
CPU part 2
CPU part 3

13MB per file 

Let me know if you need other pictures 

Many thanks for giving us feed back on your 'historical' work, relative to this 'historical' game 

[DarthNuno]

3. PGN board :

Now let's see the difference between the PGN boards.

UP : Starblade
DOWN : Galaxian³



Wow... these two boards are exactly the same  ...except the name, see :

Starblade 





Galaxian³ 





No difference at all! But why Namco named it differently?

- STARBLADE : 2252961301 SYS21 PGN(C)

- GALAXIAN³ : 8623961600 PGN

Well, because the original hardware has been done for Galaxian³ first, when Namco decided to use this part of hardware (PGN board in that case) for others games like Starblade, they probably decided to name that system 'SYS21'.

[uncletom]

Oh man damn! This forum is interesting! I keep running into bigger and better surprises each time I come here! I don't want to go to work, but instead sit and read every thread in this forum. I have to get back to this later...

[Etienne MacGyver]

Oh man damn! This forum is interesting! I keep running into bigger and better surprises each time I come here! I don't want to go to work, but instead sit and read every thread in this forum. I have to get back to this later...

thats what i thought when i entered, i spend the whole weekend 

[uncletom]

haha..well ofcourse you did. I normally hang on our swedish forum 'arkadtorget.se' where we discuss various things from arcade games, repairs, to whatever at all between heaven and earth. But I feel that there's nobody like me in Sweden with whom I can identify regarding my game preferences. On dragonslairfans, I feel that here are lots of me, that's people like me.

You know, I was, and still am the only guy in Sweden who imported the Starblade, my Starblade was the only one in this country. I leased it out to an operater in town, together with my then newly bought STUN Runner. So my Starblade was sharing the arcade with Sega Rally, Indy 500 and some billiards. Although I think that the clients were somewhat not exactly Starblade players, still the game had gone about 5000 games in a month which is about 50.000 SEK counting 1 credit for 10kr.

[uncletom]

Ehm, I may have been wrong about the 5000 games in a month. I have a very bad memory. 50k SEK sounds alot. It could have been a 1000 games in one month. Sorry.